But recently, while trying to install RVM instead of the default Mavericks Ruby, the script that normally just “works” fails with the ominous message:

: Requirements installation failed with status: 1.

It turns out to be something funky with Mavericks and the Homebrew step of the installation. Luckily, despite the failure of the script, you can simply install Hombrew manually to solve the problem. Installing Homebrew is a triviality, simply execute the following command in Terminal:

It will first install the XCode Command Line Tools (don’t worry if you already have it, just hit “install” and let it do it’s thing) and then once the Xcode dialog disappears, hit [any] key in Terminal and it will auto-download and auto-install itself. Once its all finished (and it can take a few minutes, just be patient), simply re-execute the command to install RVM Ruby.

Update:
Forget what I said. Install Homebrew (really, do it now) and use HomeBrew to install it.

Pipe Viewer (pv) – is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion. However, it isn’t included by default in Mac OSX.

The good news is that there are several ports of pv, you just need to go and grab one:

Pv allows you to get a really awesome progress of your terminal commands to see how things are going; especially useful for long operations (such as cp or tar etc) so you know everything is ticking over time (and perhaps even giving an ETA for completion):